A Deeper Look into the Self Insert
A recent manga was announced by Viz media called Half is More (Hanbun Kyoudai). It explores a person of mix descendent (I refuse to word “race”) in modern Japan. Generally speaking, these sort of works don’t get published in the west until half way or after the original run. As Half is More was just announced, it would probably take a year or two to get fully translated since our first look is in Japanese.
Despite that, Grifters over here in the west have latched onto Half is More in order to claim and criticize it for supposedly being a self insert fic, as if it were a bad thing. All because the author themselves is of mix descendent living in Japan. Obviously it’s a passion project of theirs. Yet these people wish to tear down art in its purest form.
Here’s the thing: so what if the character is a self insert?
Write What You Know
You see when I first got into digital art way back as a teenager, I had no idea what I was doing. My character, Zack, started out as “me as a [blue] fox,” or what those in the fandom would a say is a “fursona.” But I had grander plans of portraying him as a fleshed out web comic character for my little brother. Instead, both wound up being true when we moved. It’s just instead of my brother it wound becoming a wider audience I never intended to have. Despite all that, no one cared that he was in essence a self insert.
This unintended formula kept going as I went through numerous iterations of different fursonas of varies species and names whom that would go to represent my username and display name. Each one all eventually got repurposed into their own characters. It actually wasn’t until the late 2010s when I gained the nickname “tonytins” and later built upon that to become “Tony Bark.” I was finally able to resolve that headache while continuing to march on with what works best.
A long running theme with Zack was a sibling rivalry. My cousin was like a brother to me and then I got a real brother! At the time, this character was basically a representation of my own half-brother who I took in my own direction. When we moved, I had no choice but to scrap and drew from a new brief replacement emerged based on feedback. Unfortunately, that all fell into the void after several hardware failures. It wasn’t until just a few years ago that I basically came full circle.
You see, I had several model sheets that all took on the mantle of Zack’s name during this period. Even though the story versions remained relatively consistent to his 2008 portrayal. I also recently created an avatar on Second Life that was also named after him with shared a similar visual style and themes but was a blue fennec that had completely different outfit and other subtler differences. I really liked this because it did represent me today but I also like Zack for who he is. I realized they’re both sides of the same coin. So I resolved this inconsistency by renaming the SL-based character to Max and making the two siblings. Even if I were to go the cousin route to resolve some loose ends from past stories, they would still have the same brotherly bond.
Max is an energetic fennec that jams at his character and tinkers away at what whatever tech he can. Zack, by contrast, is a thoughtful radio DJ who writes code in his spare him. Beyond music, the two share a love of arcade games, soccer, and much more. The brother can blend their tinkering and programming skills to create something better than if they did it alone.
You have nooo idea how happy this make me.
What This Is Really About
When someone makes an ethnic swap, Grifters demand an original character. When someone else makes an original character, they claim it’s a self insert and demand they write a memoir instead. Some even did this to Turning Red because the character’s heritage is the same as the creator.
Do you see the pattern here? These Grifters don’t want these people talking about THAT subject, at the very least, let alone their culture, all by treating said tropes as some kind of law when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
But even if we set that aside all that, this feels rather ironic. In an effort to criticize other people inserting themselves into their own stories, these Grifters show much they want others to write about them. It’s all the more obvious when you see how most of their complaints about Turning Red can be summed up to “well, that person isn’t me.”
Yup. And I’m not a blue fennec.